For a brief moment, they hesitated. Something in my father's eyes, that unbroken fire, that pride that refused to bend even now, made them pause. The old Don's gaze still carried the ghost of the man who had once decided whether men like them lived or disappeared. But that moment didn't last.
Giada, thriving in the chaos like it was her personal stage, strode forward with a gleam of excitement in her eyes. Her fingers brushed the hollow of her throat as she moved, that old habit, and then without a second thought, she raised her hand and slapped my father hard across the face.
The sound rang out, crisp and brutal.
He froze. Completely.
This was a man who had once stood at the top. Former head of the Commission of the Five Families. A man who had sat across from senators, judges, governors, men whose careers he had built or ended with a phone call. A man who commanded respect wherever he went. And now, in front of a room full of people, he had been struck by the very woman who had stolen everything from him, a Sorrentino nobody who had crawled into his household through his son-in-law's bed.